If I try to remember
it’s the sun I see
Wet rope hung on painted clouds
Silent summer warmth in Child’s garden
I fell from the tree of winterberries
Mother is at the races tonight
Old girl shouts at the dirt
The house light glows through evening
Lying, I watch—
a cracked helmet tugs at my chin
a fallen trunk by the tinkling pond
I think of a black milk
as the night sinks

Most summers since I was 17, I’ve gone hitchhiking. In California, at 19, I rode with a stuntman who estimated he’d sustained 50 concussions. A few years later, in Utah, a young man said God told him to pick me up; the next morning, a mother coming off a night shift told me she regretted her disinterest in the Church. In Wyoming, an oil-field geologist steamed about his divorce after months alone in a trailer. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to,” he said.

If you have tips about DOGE and its data collection, you can contact Ian and Charlie on Signal at @ibogost.47 and @cwarzel.92.
If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.

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Our editors compiled six stories to serve as your weekend reads. Spend time with articles about why grandparents are reaching their limit, an “impossible” disease outbreak in the Alps, the Trump administration’s many conflicts of interest, and more.